Before I read the scripture today and get started into the
message, I have a request from you.
I would like an extra measure of prayers this coming week.
I, I hope that that you know, I know you all have a lot going on
a lot going on here. But as you're praying, I, I hope
that that you would be willing to pray for me on a regular
basis because as, as I prepare sermons for Sunday, because my
goal is always not to speak my opinion or my ideas, but speak
what the Spirit wants us all to hear from his word each week.
But I am feeling led. And I'm glad Rick mentioned the,
the war between Israel and Iran and, and, and now our
involvement in it. And I am not an expert in those
things. And, and I, as, as you know, I,
I am determined to avoid partisan politics from the
pulpit. This is one of those big kinds
of things that affects us, even if we're not directly involved
in the conflict ourselves. It's something that that it, it,
it has. It has certainly a national
impact here and some respects a global impact.
And there are great stakes at this moral and ethical stakes as
well as political stakes. And I, I, as I woke up that I
didn't see the news last night, I saw it this morning early as
I, I woke up and about our now active participation in that
conflict. I, I am feeling like I might,
I'm thinking God might be leading me to address this
situation as part of the sermon next Sunday.
And, and because I, I, I don't know what that would look like
exactly, which is why I'm asking for your prayers that if God
really wants me to do that, that God would make it clear and make
the message clear. And if God doesn't want me to do
that, that God would make that clear as well.
I want to be faithful to God in all of this, though I don't know
what that would look like. But, but if I do ultimately end
up addressing it as part of next week's sermon, it it I can tell
you what it won't be. It won't be a a partisan rant
against one side or the other. It won't be a religious rant
against one religion or another. And it, it won't be an
ideological rant against one ideology or another that I am a
firm believer that in heaven there will be no Republicans and
there will be no Democrats and there will be no socialists and
there will be no communists and there will be no, you know, name
your ideology that's out there. The folks that are in heaven
will be there as followers of Jesus Christ.
And and so I never want to anything that I say from the
pulpit to make someone feel like I can't be here because of, you
know, I'm, I'm not welcome because of my politics.
And so just just grace, pray for me again to, to really hear
where God is leading in all of this and that I'm faithful to
him and all of that. So please, that's just again, my
my request for your prayers. That said, we're going to jump
into the message today and we are moving in as our and our in
our walk through the Scriptures. We are moving into Genesis
chapter 6 and heading up to the flood here and just going to
read a few verses from Genesis chapter 6.
Read verses one through 8. I can tell you that at no point
in my life have I ever read the first 5 verses of Genesis
chapter 6 and said to myself, boy, I can't wait to preach on
that. This is one of the strangest
passages in the entire Bible. And in fact, I have been
reluctant to preach on it. I tried to skip over it and I
felt like, no, I'm going to have to preach on it and and so I'm
going to read it. If you don't know what I'm
talking about already, you will know very soon when I'm talking
about when I tell you this is one of the strangest passages in
the Bible. Let's jump in Genesis 6 verses
one through 8, when human beings began to increase in number on
the earth and daughters were born to them.
The sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were
beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.
Then the Lord said, My spirit will not contend with humans
forever, for they are mortal. Their days will be 120 years.
The Nephilim were also on the earth in those days and also
afterward when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans
and had children by them. They were the heroes of old men
of renown. The Lord saw how great the
wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that
every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was
only evil. All the time the Lord regretted
that He had made human beings on the earth, and His heart was
deeply troubled. So the Lord said, I will wipe
from the face of the earth the human race I have created, and
with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move
along the ground, for I regret that I have made them.
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord, and the Lord had
his blessing to the reading and the hearing of His Word.
It's a lot of weird stuff in just a few verses, a lot of
challenging stuff in just a few verses.
But the theme that I want us to focus on as we work through the
weirdness and the challenge here is, is the folly of idolizing
power. The temptation in our culture is
very real. And I think it's the temptation
in in in most cultures, maybe all cultures, to idolize power
and those who have power. And by idolize, I don't mean get
down on your knees and, you know, do this.
I mean, say, man, if only I had what they had.
Boy, they've got it made. Wow.
If I could just have that kind of power, that kind of wealth,
that kind of influence, then I could really do something
important too. Idolizing power.
There's folly in it, and the folly is such that the Lord put
a deadline. Put a deadline when he said my
spirit will not contend with humans forever.
There's an end to my patients, God says, and I will deal with
this. There will be a reckoning.
So the folly of idolizing power. Before we can really explore
that, though, we have to deal with some translation challenges
and, and, and address which addresses some of the weirdness
that's in these verses. So there are there are at least
four things in these verses that provide incredibly difficult
challenges for people trying to translate Hebrew into English.
So we know what these verses really say.
The first one of those is a phrase that's repeated 2 times,
Sons of God. The sons of God married
daughters of Eve, daughters of humans, depending on which, you
know, version you're looking at, the sons of God married human
women, and the Nephilim were born.
These heroes, mighty folks on the earth.
What and who are the sons of God?
It's a challenge. There are two major schools of
thought on this, and the simple fact is that the word God, sons,
is easy. That one's a simple one, but the
word God there is, is a word that is difficult to translate
in this context. It's used a lot in the Bible.
It's the word Elohim, and it's actually a plural word that most
of the time it's used, it refers to God, the Lord, God Almighty,
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God the Father, Elohim.
That's the way it's mostly used. There are some places in the Old
Testament where it means God's plural and Psalm chapter 8, for
example, where the psalmist writes to God, speaking to God.
And what are humans that you are mindful us, yet you have made us
a little lower, a little less than the gods.
It's the word Elohim. It's also used in Exodus and
translated as judges that in legal context, when they're
disputes among the people of Israel, they are to take those
disputes to the Elohim. And clearly in that context,
it's not talking about God or gods, but human beings acting as
judges in these judicial conflicts.
And and so the question is, what's going on here in Genesis
chapter 8? Are these sons of God?
So the two main schools of thought are the sons of God, are
angels some sort of angelic or spiritual beings that see women
on the earth and think, wow, they're really pretty.
I want one of those or many of those.
And they come down and they join with the human women and they
create these hybrid babies that are called Nephilim.
That's one school of thought. There are a lot of people out
there that believe that, a lot of ancient and modern
theologians, Jewish and Christians that believe that.
The other major school of thought, it says that angels and
humans can't mate their spirits. Angels are spirits.
They cannot make babies with humans.
It just doesn't work. And so this must mean God Elohim
here must mean more like judges. These are powerful humans that
are in such a position of power that they can pick any woman
that they want or more than one if they want and say I'll have
them and that that some of their children became mighty people in
the land. I just, this is not one of those
things where if you, if you're on one side or the other, you're
going to heaven and the other side you're going to hell.
It's not like that. There again, it's this is
notoriously difficult to, there's no way to conclusively
determine one or the other. I can tell you that some of the
Christian heavyweights like Augustine, John Calvin, and John
Wesley all said angels and humans can't have babies.
It just doesn't work. And so I'm going to treat this
as if these sons of God are not Angel human hybrids or the sons
of God aren't angels and the Nephilim aren't Angel human
hybrids, that these are powerful human beings.
And, and if you disagree with that, that's as I guess all
right. This is 1 where lots of people
disagree. However, I do want to say this,
given that either translation is legitimate according to the
language, I think it's much more relevant to our day.
I, I cannot remember the last time I had to deal with an Angel
human hybrid, you know, whether that was a live challenge in our
community, our country, or our world.
What do we do with these Angel human hybrids?
But there's a lot of relevance in our context to how do we deal
with powerful people who just take what they want and do what
they want and have the might to back up their political and
legal power in the world. That's a real world problem.
So we're going to, we're going to treat the sons of God in that
way. The heroes is another one of
those words. Heroes.
That's the NIV translation. A lot of translations use mighty
men or mighty ones, and that's those actually are better.
Heroes in our context always has a positive connotation or almost
always you know the heroes are the good guys and you have the
villains or you have superheroes and you have super villains.
But heroes has a positive connotation to it in our
culture. That word in Hebrew does not
have any positive. It can be used for good people
that are mighty. It can be used for evil people
that are mighty and it's used often of God who is mighty.
So it goes any of those directions.
And so we when we're thinking of the Nephilim, these children
that were born from the these sons of God marrying these
women, think of them as heroes does not imply that in any way
that they were good. What it means is that they had a
lot of strength. They had a lot of might, a lot
of power to back up their their status as the children of the
ones that had power and authority in the land.
OK, then we've got abide versus content, which is not as
challenging the others that I mean when it says God the Lord
said my spirit will not contend with humans forever.
You can also translate that Hebrew.
As the Lord said, my spirit will not abide with humans forever. 2
very different concepts, but practically speaking it has the
same impact. Here.
God is putting a time limit on things and God is either saying
I'm I'm going to, I'm not going to stay with human beings
forever. If you're going to behave badly,
I will eventually withdraw my presence from you.
Or God is saying I'm not going to wrestle with you forever,
trying to wrestle you into doing things my way.
At some point I'm going to stop and back up.
The practical impact is the same, but the word could be
translated either way. The other one is the 120 years.
I'm not going to stay. And then God says I've set a
limit on the humans at 120 years.
There's again, there's a lot of division.
There's some folks that say that 120 years means God is now
saying that's the maximum lifespan for human beings.
Prior to this. If you go back and look at
Genesis chapter 5, that's where you see all of these people
living hundreds and hundreds of years, 678900 years and and God
is saying no more. From this point on, human beings
will not live past 120 years. And now 120 years is about as
old as I've ever heard a human being living.
The other well, the challenge with that particular way of
looking at 120 years is that that even after the flood, there
were still a lot of human beings.
The Bible identifies as living much longer than 120 years.
I believe that that. And again, I'm not, I'm not a
Hebrew scholar. And, and again, this is no other
areas. Different people believe
different things. The other big school of thought
on that is that God is setting a time limit.
From the point that God is making this pronouncement, it's
going to be 120 years until the flood.
He has started the timer ticking.
And it was during that time frame that Noah built the ark.
It was a big boat and he didn't have any heavy machinery to help
him with it. And that that Noah spent the
next 320 years and then the flood came.
I think that given the context and the overall impact of this
passage, that that's more likely the one that that God is saying,
here's the time limit. You got 120 years before I'm
wiping out humanity from the face of the earth, except for
Noah and his family. So that's translation problems.
I just wanted to get those out, by the way, so that we're all on
the same page, because what we're talking about here is not
the challenges of how do we deal with Angel human hybrids.
The problem that we're talking about, the evil of the day that
was there is what we have to focus on.
And that evil of that day has to do with powerful human beings
using their power in bad ways. Let's take a look at a few of
the verses again here in Genesis 65, the Lord saw how how the
Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had
become on the earth, and that every inclination of the
thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
That's bad. I mean that I've met some bad
folks in my life that have done some very bad things.
And if none of them, even as individuals, could I say that
every inclination of their heart and every thought in their mind
was only evil all the time. They love their moms.
They, they sometimes love, you know, but God saying this, and
this is not just true for a few people.
This is everybody except Noah and his family.
Noah found favor with God. Everybody else, every thought
they had, every action that they took was always evil all the
time. That's about as bad as it gets.
It's about as bad as it gets. And, and part of that is that
there's no turning back here. This is the legacy of Cain, the
legacy of the sin of Adam and Eve.
And and now it's all evil all the time.
If that's the case, then there's no change in the boat.
There's no change in direction. The Titanic's going to hit the
iceberg. Because if, if, if everyone's
thoughts are always evil all the time.
There's no space for God, and there's no way that children
raised in that environment are going to just follow in the
footsteps of their parents. And there's no room for God to
come in or even a godly person to come in and change direction.
But this is very general. This is not specific.
There are two specific evils that are mentioned in Genesis
chapter 6. Two specific evils.
One of them we see in verses 11 to 13.
Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of
violence. God saw how corrupted the earth
had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their
ways. So God said to Noah, I am going
to put an end to all the people, for the earth is filled with
violence because of them. One of the specific evils that
God names is the evil of violence.
Again, this is the legacy of Cain.
This is people taking Cain's way of doing things and adopting
that of their own. I'm going to take what I want,
and I don't care who I have to step on, who I have to hurt, who
I have to, who I have to kill to get it.
Violence has become the rule of the day.
The way I advance myself, the way I advance my honor, the way
I secure my position is through violence.
And violence is one of the two named reasons why God wiped out
the earth. A love of violence.
But there's another one, and it's related.
It's a different in some respects.
It's just a different kind of violence.
Let's go back to those sons of God.
The sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were
beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.
Now, if we're not careful, we can see this in romantic 20th
and 21st century eyes. The sons of God looked out.
We fall in love with these women or this woman, and we can choose
to marry them if we want. We're not bound by rules of
rigid social hierarchy that demand that we only marry, you
know, parent. This is not what this is about.
You'll notice. This isn't women getting to
decide that they can marry who they want.
This is powerful human being, the sons of the judges, the sons
of people in the Thorpe positions of authority and
power, looking out into the world and saying I get a pick
whichever and however many women I want and make them my wife.
The other type of evil that was going on, which is another form
of violence, is powerful people exploiting weak people and
vulnerable people for their own personal satisfaction.
I will take what I want, even human beings, even human beings.
So what was the clearest picture that we have of the state of the
world that God LED God to say, I repent.
I regret having made humans, and I'm going to wipe humans from
the face of the earth. The corrupt and violent
exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by the powerful.
This was the condition prior to the flock.
The powerful took what they wanted from those who were
weaker than them. The powerful took what they
wanted from people who were vulnerable.
The mighty exploited the weak. The rich exploited the
vulnerable. And God said, this is not what I
want, this is not what I ever intended.
That word regretted can be translated as repented.
God repented and and God created human beings and put us in a
garden. And when Adam was alone, God
made Eve. And God said this, this is an
Ezzor for Eve. This is a suitable partner for
him. This is someone.
These two together can be mutually interdependent, caring
for each other, supporting, encouraging, growing together.
I created a world in which even humans and animals can live in
harmony with each other without even exploiting that kind of
relationship. That was my intention, says God.
And now it's people fighting and destroying and exploiting each
other all the time. And that has become the order of
the day. And God said this is not what I
wanted, this wasn't, this is not what I planned and I will not
tolerate this going on forever. And so God hit the button and
started the timer and said 120 years.
It's all coming to an end. It's all coming to end of the
corrupt and the violent, exploiting the weak and the
vulnerable by their power. So what can we do?
I mean the simple fact that we are not that the world today
with as many problems as there are is not as bad as it was the
world was just prior to the flood.
I, I, I can say with 100% confidence that the thought and
of the minds and the the meditations of the hearts of
everyone in the world is not all evil all the time.
I think, I think we can look around this room and see
examples of people who are, who are not thinking all evil all
the time, but instead, like Noah, are seeking God and the
righteousness of God. But we know that there are
powerful people out there pulling strings and manipulating
and taking and using their power and their wealth to get what
they want and when they want it. And they don't have to follow
the same rules as the people without that wealth and power.
And the rich have a very different legal system than the
rest of us do. And the richer you are, the more
that legal system convenient, you know, with someone with
enough money a fine. What is a fine to Elon Musk or
to Jeff Bezos? There are companies and
corporations out there that continually break the law and
they just pay the fine because it's cheaper to break the law
and pay the fine than it is to follow the law.
And and so fines are only have an impact on a person if they're
poor. That's when a fine has an it's
the wealthy and the powerful can do things, particularly the
really ones that are the Nephilim, the ones that are
really mighty in the world, the ones that folks really look up
to that that seem to get away with anything and everything and
can do whatever they want without consequence.
And if they and if they do get in trouble, maybe they can get a
pardon for it too. So what can we do in this kind
of context? How can we be a witness?
What can we do before the world would ever get as bad?
Well, God has already said, I'm not going to destroy the world
again with a flood, so we don't have to worry about that
duplicating itself in that way. But what can we do in the face
of mighty and powerful people? The first thing we can do is we
can beware of idolizing power. It's so easy to idolize power.
It's so easy to sit back and think, you know what, man, if I
just had the money. I just had the money.
I don't know, I'm picking on Bezos and Musk today.
They're the names that come to my mind.
You can throw Bill Gates in there and any number of other
men and women. I just had their money.
I just had their influence. If I could just get the
president to listen to me like he listens to them.
That's the presidents of both parties call the billionaires.
What do you think the billionaires of both parties
call the presidents and they donate to the campaigns and they
get the influence and they get the power.
And it's so easy to idolize that.
So much in our culture pushes us to do that.
News and news feeds and Facebook posts and YouTube and TikTok and
all of the glamour and all of the glitz that goes along with
being mega wealthy or being a powerful politician or being a
movie star or an athletic star and people all looking up to
him. They got all this power.
And oh, if I just, if I could just get close to that, if I
could just be part of that, If I could just get some of that, if
I could be like them, if I could ride their coattails.
That's what idolizing power. It's not about I'm going to bow
down and worship Elon Musk. I don't know anyone out there
that's doing that. There's probably a few people,
the people that say I'm going to be like, that's what I want for
myself. That's what I want to pursue.
I want safety and security and peace and prosperity for my
family. And so I'm going to be like
those folks that are seeking wealth and power, and I'm going
to seek wealth and power too. And that's the idolizing of
power. When we turn to human sources of
power and influence for our safety and security and
protection, rather than turning to God.
When we turn to human sources of power and wealth for glory and
honor instead of turning to God, that's what I'd.
And when we do that, we will inevitably follow in the
footsteps of the Canes and the Lamex and all of those other
folks that said, I'm going to get what I want no matter what
it costs anyone else for me and my own.
I'll get power and I'll get glory.
We've got to be aware of that and that tendency in our lives.
And the second thing we can do is we can pursue and maintain
righteousness in our own lives. It's what Noah did.
There is no sense that Noah had any capacity to change the
direction of the culture around him, and yet he found favor.
In God's eyes. He was living.
That's that same language. God looked on Abel and his
offering with favor. God looked on Noah with favor.
Noah was living. We don't know the details of it,
but there was something righteous in his life, some way
that he was living, and we can pursue that in our own lives.
We've got some great examples and great role models of that
throughout history. If we want to look for more
contemporary examples of cultures that were were similar
to the culture of the world just before the flood, one of the
easiest, one of the lowest hanging fruit to pick on with
all of that is Nazi Germany, right?
I mean, it's easy to look at that culture and say there was a
lot of evil all the time going on in Nazi Germany.
And yet we see people within that culture itself that were
like Noah, they found favor in God's eyes.
They they they did righteousness even in the midst of all of the
evil that was going on around them.
Corey Tenboom is, is one of the easiest examples of that.
She was in the Netherlands and he after they got overrun by the
Nazis, she and her family helped hide Jews in their housekeeping
them secret until they couldn't anymore.
And then they were sent to prison.
And everyone but Corey, everyone in her family died but her.
But her. And then there were others.
And I got, I make a list because my brain does not hold lists in
my head as well. So I got to refer to my list.
And where, Yeah, I'm in the wrong spot.
There we go. Meep geese.
You know who meep geese she was? She was just a secretary.
And I only say just a secretary not because that's
insignificant, but. But there's no power in that.
You can't change the viewer's mind from the position of being
a secretary. But but she was a secretary for
Otto Frank, and her family had a room that no one really knew
about. And she hit Anne Frank and her
family and others for as long as they could at great risk of
their own lives. Instead of joining in the
exploitation of the Jewish folks that were being persecuted, they
at risk of their own lives, they sought to shelter and protect
those who were weak and vulnerable in that culture.
The other end of the economic scales, Oskar Schindler, who
were operated in Germany and in Poland.
He was an industrialist, A businessman.
He had money and wealth, and he used initially that money and
wealth to make himself rich. He was initially part of the
problem, and he was going to be happy to exploit the cheap labor
of the Jews to make himself rich.
He was joining. He was one of those people of
power. And then he saw what was really
happening, and then he put all of his wealth and his own life
on the line to protect and shield the lives of Jews.
Instead of exploiting them, he used his position to protect and
defend the weak and the vulnerable rather than
exploiting them for his own game.
But the one and I never heard of this person before very
recently. Chiune Sugiyara.
Anyone ever heard of Chiune Sugiyara?
Anyone ever heard that name? He's Japanese and and he was
appointed as a diplomat in Lithuania.
He was a diplomat in Lithuania in 1940 and when Germany invaded
Poland. Lithuania is a little country
northeast of Poland. When Germany invaded Poland and
the Jews from Poland fleeing the Germans fled into Lithuania.
Now, he was a Japanese diplomat. His government was allied with
the Nazis, and yet he used his position to write transit visas
for Jews so they could escape. And he did this even when he was
instructed by his bosses to not do it.
He and his family, it was handwritten.
They were writing 2 to 300 visas a day for months and ultimately
helped 6000 Jews escape the Nazis.
And, and he said later, and I love this, I love this.
I'm going to find the quote again so I can say it right.
He didn't. He got no I'd never heard of
this guy before. I'd never heard of him and and
he said this. I may have disobeyed my
government, but if I didn't, I would be disobeying God.
What a beautiful statement of someone who was living like
Noah. Instead of joining in the
exploitation of the weak and vulnerable, he could have used
those folks to advance himself in the eyes of his own
government and said he put his own life and his own future at
risk. He and his family, I believe it
was his wife, not sure if they had kids there, writing these
visas together to help protect as many as they could.
They couldn't change the tide of war, but they could do what they
could to protect those that were around them.
Nazi Germany isn't the only place where you find that sort
of oppression and wealthy and powerful, exploiting the weak
and the vulnerable. There's another name you might
have heard, Nargis Mohammadi. Anyone ever heard of Nargis
Mohammadi? She's in.
She's alive now. She's in jail now in the Islamic
Republic of Iran. She's a journalist and an
activist who has sacrificed an extraordinary amount of her life
to oppose the Islamic Republic's treatment of women and prisoners
and other issues in Iran, where where women, if they show too
much of their hair, can be dragged into a van and
imprisoned or beaten, where prisoners are tortured in the
jails. She was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize while she was in jail. She's still in jail when in
1923, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work.
The Islamic Republic did not give her a furlough to go
receive the Peace Prize, and they did not allow them to bring
the prize to her. They're in jail that some of her
family who were living in exile from Iran went and received it
on her own behalf. Even while she was in jail, she
was organizing protests among the other prisoners of the over
the treatment of women and torture and the conditions
within the prisons. She's been tortured.
And she's done all of this even while suffering from significant
health problems, partial paralysis, and severe lung
problems, and she's still doing it today.
By all counts, she is one of the weak and the vulnerable.
And yet she's doing what she can to protect and shelter other
folks who are weak and vulnerable, even at great cost
to her own life. We can pursue the righteousness
of God. The righteousness of God is.
Again, it's not about following the rules.
The righteousness of God is about relationships.
Love God with your heart, your soul, all your heart, all your
soul, all your mind, and all your strength, and love your
neighbor as yourself. And that's what these examples
and many, many, many others, and many other cultures and times
and places of folks loving God with all that they had and
loving their neighbors, their self, even when surrounded by
great wickedness, great evil, and great danger, even at great
cost to their own lives. Pursue and maintain
righteousness in your own life. The other thing you can do, the
other thing we can do is say yes to God's urgent call to repent
some. Sometimes we get caught up in it
without even realizing it. When we find ourselves behaving
in ways or idolizing in power in ways that are leading us to be
unconcerned for the poor, unconcerned for the needy,
unconcerned for the weak and the vulnerable.
When we find ourselves doing things that that make our lives
better at the expense of others. When we become aware of that, we
can repent. The clock is still ticking or
it's ticking again. There's a new clock.
It's kind of. We see that in the Book of
Revelation. We're meeting this Wednesday, by
the way. I should throw that in there
too. We got two more sessions left.
This there is still urgency in the call.
There is still urgency in the call.
And when we see ways that we are doing that, we can turn to God
and say, forgive me and show me how to be like Noah.
Show me how to be like Chiune. Show me how to be like Nargis.
Show me how to be like me. Show me how to be like Oscar,
like all of these other folks in so many places, who instead of
instead of idolizing power, what is going on?
Boom, my thumb must be twitchy. Instead of idolizing power, we
take seriously God's notion that He will not contend with us
forever on these things. He will not abide with us
forever on these things. There comes a time when we need
to choose. Whenever we see that
opportunity, let's choose. Let's choose to follow God and
live in loving relationships with Him and others in Jesus
name, Amen. Amen.